Toei just spent its 70th anniversary quietly agreeing with everyone who bailed on Dragon Ball Super in 2015. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus premiered on Fuji TV on Sunday, October 11, 2026, and landed on Crunchyroll and Hulu the same day. It is not a new story. It is the Battle of Gods arc, and then (if the unofficial listing holds) Resurrection F and Universe 6, rebuilt with redrawn cuts, a tightened script and newly recorded voice tracks. That is the Kai treatment. Kai is what you do to a show when you know the first version did not land.
We think that is the best thing to happen to Dragon Ball on TV in a decade, and we think it is the right place to start for anyone who has been avoiding Super. Here is the argument, the counterargument, and what is on our shelf while Beerus himself is not.
The first 27 episodes of Super were the problem
Say it plainly: Super's 2015 debut was the roughest stretch of TV Dragon Ball since the Garlic Jr. filler. It opened by retelling two movies fans had already seen in theaters, Battle of Gods and Resurrection F, and stretched them across 27 weekly episodes with a production that visibly could not keep up. Episode 5, the first Goku-versus-Beerus fight, became a meme for off-model faces before the episode had finished airing in Japan. The show got great later (the Tournament of Power is the best sustained run the franchise has had since Namek), but "it gets good after episode 27" is a sentence that loses people.
So a rebuilt opening is not a cash grab. It is a fix. Toei is calling it the "ENHANCED" edition: Matsuto Seya on series composition and direction, Tadayoshi Yamamuro (the man who has drawn Goku's face for most of your life) as character designer and chief animation director, Norihito Sumitomo back on music, and Masako Nozawa and Kōichi Yamadera re-recording Goku and Beerus. New opening by MEGATERA ZERO, new ending by VK Blanka, weekly episodes, with episode 2 ("The God of Destruction Heads to the Planet of the Kai") due October 18.
Beerus is the best idea Toriyama had after Z, and the old show buried it
Here is the part that gets lost under the power-level discourse. The Battle of Gods arc is a comedy. A cat-shaped god of destruction, famously modeled on Toriyama's own cat, wakes up from a decades-long nap, hears a rumor about a Saiyan who beat Frieza, and spends most of the story at Bulma's birthday party getting offended by pudding. Whis is the straight man. Vegeta doing the bingo dance to keep a god from blowing up the planet is the single most Dragon Ball thing in Dragon Ball, because the franchise started as a gag manga and never stopped being one underneath.
The 2015 version drowned that in padding. Episode 1 of Beerus (which premiered early at New York Comic Con on October 8, with Jason Douglas and Ian Sinclair in the room) cuts straight to the god waking up and going shopping for a fight. Premiere-weekend reviews describe a tighter, faster episode with the opening Beerus-versus-alien brawl fully redone, down to a new crimson aura on the alien's power-up. That is the cut that should have been made in 2015.
The counterargument, and it is a real one
The honest knock on Beerus is the same knock on Kai: compression kills the hangout episodes, and the hangout episodes are where Dragon Ball's characters actually live. The first episode drops Goten and Trunks' present-shopping, Gohan and Videl's married life, and, the one that stings, Vegeta's forced family vacation with Bulma and Trunks. That vacation is a small, funny step in Vegeta turning from a villain into a dad, and losing it makes the world feel thinner. But Why Tho gave the premiere a 6 out of 10 on exactly those grounds (October 11), and we think that score is fair for anyone who already loves the 131-episode version.
Our answer is that both can exist. Kai did not delete Z. If Beerus is 19 episodes (that count comes from an unofficial listing shared September 28, not from Toei, so treat it as a rumor), it is an on-ramp, and on-ramps are allowed to skip scenery. The person who finishes Beerus and wants more can go back for the pudding episodes. The person who starts with the 2015 episode 5 never gets anywhere.
Where to start, depending on who you are
Never watched Dragon Ball? Do not start here. Watch Dragon Ball Z Kai, which did for Z what this does for Super, then come to Beerus. Daima (2024, Age 775) slots in between if you want it; the Beerus arc picks up in Age 778, and nothing in it requires Daima.
Watched Z as a kid and never touched Super? This show was built for you. Episode 1 assumes you know who Frieza is and who the Saiyans are, and nothing else. New episodes hit Crunchyroll and Hulu Sunday mornings around 10:15 a.m. Eastern, with Netflix in the US following from October 17.
Already finished Super? Give it three episodes. The redrawn fights are the draw, and the Resurrection F stretch (if it is coming) is where a fix matters most, because that was the padded arc. Not sold by the Planet of the Kai episode? Go back to the Tournament of Power and wait for whatever Toei announces next.
Our Beerus shelf is empty, and we would rather say so
We sell this stuff, so here is the bias up front: we do not have a single Beerus or Whis figure in stock right now. Not a Funko, not a FiGPiN, not a prize figure. Our whole Dragon Ball shelf is thin at the moment and we are ordering. What we do have maps onto the arcs this show is about, mostly because Bandai's Chibi Masters line picked the right characters.
The Chibi Masters Frieza (4th Form) at $11.99 is the one to grab first, because Frieza's return is the next thing the official site teases after Beerus. The Super Saiyan Blue Goku and Super Saiyan Blue Vegeta ($11.99 each) are the form that fight introduces, so a three-figure row for under $36 covers the first two arcs. And the FiGPiN Bulma #366 ($14.99) is the party host the whole first arc orbits; she has been on our pin wall since 2020 and is suddenly the most relevant Dragon Ball character we own.
Chibi Masters Frieza (4th Form) · $11.99
Chibi Masters SSB Goku · $11.99
Chibi Masters SSB Vegeta · $11.99
FiGPiN Bulma #366 · $14.99
The pin wall is where the deep cuts are
Our FiGPiN wall has been collecting Dragon Ball characters since 2019, and a few are oddly perfect for this show. Videl #340 ($14.99) is, technically, the sixth Saiyan in the Super Saiyan God ritual, which is the best trivia question in the arc. Master Roshi #293 ($20, an Entertainment Earth exclusive) matters because Resurrection F gives the old man his best fight since the original series. Jiren #244 ($14.99, three left) and Zamasu #364 ($20, our last one) are the characters this cut will take years to reach, if it ever does. Zamasu and the original Goku #22 ($14.99, also down to one) live in The Back Room, where everything is 30% off automatically at checkout through November 30, 2026, which quietly makes them the cheapest Dragon Ball on the site.
FiGPiN Videl #340 · $14.99
FiGPiN Master Roshi #293 · $20.00
FiGPiN Jiren #244 · $14.99
FiGPiN Zamasu #364 · $20.00
If 19 episodes is not enough, the FiGPiN XL Broly #X12 ($24.99) and Chibi Masters SSB Gogeta ($11.99) cover the 2018 movie that comes after all of this, and the Nanoblock Raditz ($11.99) is for whoever thinks Z's first villain deserved better. Nearly all of it sits in $10 to $20.
The closer
Dragon Ball does not need to be longer. It needs to be good from the first episode, and for ten years the entry point to its most recent series was not. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus is Toei saying so out loud, with the original character designer and the original voice cast doing the saying. Watch it Sunday mornings, start with the pudding, and if the god of destruction gets his own figure before Christmas we will be the first to tell you.
Flat $5 US shipping on everything above. First order? WELCOME10 takes 10% off, once per customer. Browse the rest of the anime shelf while you wait for episode 2.